I’m currently using an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GB and I don’t planned to change it any time soon. However I have a couple of friends that are entering PC gaming or upgrading their existing rigs and asks a couple of things to me their nerdy friendly PC gamer friends.

Of course they are pretty much all tired of the current Windows bloat, spy and flakyness so we’re looking if their gaming habits and libraries would be a good match for Linux and Proton.

Considering that AMD are the best supported GPU for Linux Gaming and that NVidia is moving away from accessible pricing I was wondering if including Intel Arc would be a good or a bad idea for my proposals. I know it won’t offer the PC MASTER RACE experience but honestly who cares. My friend just wants a cheap but reliable gaming PC to play casually at 1440p or maybe even staying at 1080p. If intel won’t suit I will probably recommend second hand AMD Radeon to fit their budget.

Anyone here have tried some Intel Arc gaming on Linux? What was your experience? Any issues I should be aware? Recommendation? What distro have the best out-of-the-box experience?

Thanks

  • commander@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    Improved over the last year

    https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-b580-opengl-vulkan-eoy2025

    How it compares to Windows I wouldn’t know. I did use an Intel Arc for a while on Linux but switched to AMD for performance and idle power draw before the start of 2025. It was stable though with Steam Proton games and general day to day usage. Probably pretty good performance today relative to what it can do on Windows today compared to 2023-2024 when I was using Intel

    When I first got the card, Switch emulation did not work. I think it was around mid 2024 when it started to work well